Aug 09, 2016
Aug 09, 2016
Yesterday (8th August 2016), thousands of passengers found themselves stranded all over the world as a power outage caused US airline giant Delta’s IT systems to crash. At this day and age, and for a company such as Delta, it is almost incomprehensible that they had such a problem as a result of having all IT systems concentrated in one city (in this case Atlanta), and a fault in switchgear creating such a domino effect. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the technical problems likely will cost Delta millions of dollars in lost revenue and damage its hard-won reputation as the most reliable of the major U.S.-based international carriers, having canceled just a handful of flights in the most recent quarter.”
Delta themselves have confirmed that “some critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to Delta’s backup systems.”
Delta are not the first, as another US airline, Southwest Airlines were forced to cancel more than 2,000 flights last month, after an outage prevented travelers from checking in.
These system failures showcase the importance of hosting your data in a redundant environment across multiple geographical locations, with multiple and redundant power systems as well as regular and continuous testing of the effectiveness of the backup systems.
As Malta largest multi-site data centre, and with presence in Milan and Frankfurt, BMIT has been deploying solutions across distinct locations for customers of all sizes, but all with a common requirement to be online, all the time. Such set-ups vary in their nature, ranging from live and backup infrastructures deployed in different BMIT data centres, to more complex multi-site IT infrastructures handling massive volumes of traffic.
Systems redundancy is a critical element of BMIT’s infrastructure. All data centre infrastructure, operates on an N+2 and in some cases 2N redundancy mode, meaning that any system failure is catered for inherently in set-up. Moreover, our 40Gbps network, links the BMIT data centers in Malta, Germany and Italy via multiple routes, using different carriers and service providers, therefore eliminating single points of failure throughout.
Although BMIT undertakes regular tests on its infrastructure, our data centres had a real-life test almost exactly two years ago, as they remained up and running despite a total blackout, which left all of Malta without power for up to 12 hours on 12th of August, 2014.
We do not only protect our customers from physical risks, but also virtual attacks. Depending on the nature of your enterprise, we understand that ‘down time’ is literally not an option. However, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) could wipe out or limit access to your site and servers for hours, days or even weeks. At BMIT, we operate a multi-tiered DDOS protection and mitigation set-up, built on years of experience in handling such threats. Our DDOS solution forms an integral part of our network, therefore ensuring that both network and customers are protected.